I was thinking how this drop happened. I did have the site register only for a great portion of the year. I opened it back up just a few months ago. Meaning, you had to be logged in to view any content. I also killed off a lot of bots trying to increase page load times. I'm guessing the bots must have contributed a lot to that 1.6 million page "hits".

Hits are such a poor way to measure web traffic. Visitors and unique visitors are much more accurate. A hit on a website is on any file that is called from the server. Let's say this page has 10 images, 2 javascripts, 1 css file, and a php file; that would be 14 hits for this page alone, greatly misrepresenting how much traffic comes to this site when measured in hits.

Hits are such a poor way to measure web traffic. Visitors and unique visitors are much more accurate. A hit on a website is on any file that is called from the server. Let's say this page has 10 images, 2 javascripts, 1 css file, and a php file; that would be 14 hits for this page alone, greatly misrepresenting how much traffic comes to this site when measured in hits.

That's insane, I've heard of hit counters like that, but in over a decade of web development and administration I've never seen a counter behave like that.

I quoted the word hits for a reason and I didn't say it was a good measure of web traffic, but its the only one I have available since we used three hosts during 2010 and I no longer have access to the good stats from the original host.

The counter here increments by one whenever a .php file is loaded from the server. Hit F5, counter goes up by one if you are on the site and not a file. Click a link on the forums, counter goes up by one. Etc ... it doesn't count graphics or CSS files or db queries, nothing like that. It's a very simple counter. There's also a mod I can that tracks each unique IP, but I think it slows the site down so not worth it to me.

The amount of hits don't matter to me all that much, but I like stats so I do check them out from time to time for grins.

You cannot post new topics in this forum.
You cannot reply to topics in this forum.
You cannot delete your posts in this forum.
You cannot edit your posts in this forum.
You cannot create polls in this forum.
You cannot vote in polls in this forum.